If you thought Trump's opponents were mad when he won, just wait until you see their reaction now that he s actually starting to do things. Besides not one but two inauguration speeches, one after the other, and three inaugural balls, one of which I attended, if you look and sound a little bleary-eyed, it s because President Trump spent yesterday issuing dozens of executive orders, hundreds of executive actions, and the most dramatic policy reset for our country in perhaps 70 or 80 years.
00:14:22.400You know, energy can dictate the fate of great nations.
00:14:26.980I was speaking to my friend Alan Estrin, the executive director of PragerU.
00:14:30.940He said, you know, by my analysis of great powers rising and falling, it pretty much all comes down to energy.
00:14:36.520And the left has sought to destroy America's energy, to stop us from drilling, to stop us from fracking, to stop us from building nuclear power plants, to stop us from using any energy that actually works.
00:15:34.360Did you catch that because you were listening to the show yesterday?
00:15:37.360The president cannot change the Constitution on his own.
00:15:40.520One of Joe Biden's final acts as president was to try to change the Constitution on his own.
00:15:47.680That was one of the last things he did.
00:15:48.940Other than trying to pardon his corrupt family members, to protect himself, a corrupt politician, from being investigated and facing consequences for selling state influence for his personal enrichment, allegedly.
00:16:01.360Biden tried to single-handedly ratify the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, this feminist nonsense that would have transed our culture 50 years before anyone was really talking about it.
00:16:47.400They either keep mom or they support it.
00:16:49.160And then days later, two days later, Donald Trump offers a legitimate interpretation of a contentious question pertaining to the meaning of an amendment that's already been ratified.
00:17:43.060But what was distinctive about Trump's inauguration speech is he tied the high-flying rhetoric to particular policy proposals, notably on American territory itself.
00:17:59.540And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal.
00:18:08.420The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation.
00:18:14.140One that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.
00:18:25.140And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.
00:18:32.920The manifest destiny is an old term going back to the 19th century.
00:18:38.480You're noticing a lot of 19th century coming back.
00:18:40.880A lot of America's greatness, these eras of expansion, growth, coming back in the person of Trump.
00:18:47.780And manifest destiny is the American iteration of an ancient concept called the Translatio Imperii, that the empire, the power, the authority of the governing body moves.
00:19:04.180The idea of it comes from Troy, actually, that when Aeneas leaves Troy, the Translatio Imperii moves westward.
00:19:12.880It moves from Troy to Rome and the founding of the Roman Empire.
00:19:19.880And this is actually why Emperor Constantine is sometimes criticized, because Constantine moves the empire in the wrong direction, starts moving it east from Rome to Constantinople.
00:19:31.980It's this notion that we're moving, we're growing.
00:19:35.840It is actually part of the logic of history that the empire is to expand, and to expand westward.
00:19:41.620So when the early United States existed as merely 13 colonies on the east coast of the continent, the notion of manifest destiny arose that we were supposed to conquer westward.
00:20:27.960And so it's not merely an injustice, a fact of the fallen world, that national borders change and that some countries grow and some countries shrink.
00:20:37.980It's a political necessity because people change, because time goes on, because history moves.
00:20:42.060And Trump's saying time is moving on, and we want to make sure that we continue to grow, that we continue to be great, that we're not left behind by history.
00:20:49.040Now, here, Trump might be insinuating an expansion eastward.
00:20:53.680He might be talking about Greenland, as he's been discussing in recent weeks.
00:20:58.060Or to follow the logic of manifest destiny, the translatio imperi, and take it into, I don't know, three dimensions, four dimensions, I don't know, to take it onto another axis.
00:21:08.540He's talking about expanding even into outer space.
00:21:13.600I guess we'll go back to the moon, but we're going to go to Mars.
00:21:18.680This is going to surprise some people who view Trump as a rigid nationalist.
00:21:26.100You've heard this from the liberal media, warnings about Christian nationalism.
00:21:30.640I always tell people, if you're worried about Christian nationalism, just wait till you discover unchristian nationalism.
00:21:36.280That's going to be a lot worse, trust me.
00:21:39.080But here even, I've hesitated to call myself a Christian nationalist, beyond a practical way that perhaps Christianity is better than the alternatives.
00:31:23.000And it's one that Trump gave with, I think, sincerity, but with a clear amount of humility.
00:31:31.720This is where moving inside for the weather or maybe because there was a security threat, the latter, I think, is more likely.
00:31:37.400This is where this, I think, helped Trump because he could speak real close up to a relatively small number of people and speak, I think, quite clearly from the heart.
00:31:49.420Either the guy's a better actor than Brando or he's speaking from the heart.
00:31:52.120I think if you have a bullet go through your ear and only miss the back of your skull because of an inexplicable last second jerk of the head.
00:32:02.100He said, inexplicable by natural means, jerk of the head.
00:32:05.400I think you're going to get religion and I think that's going to humble you a little bit.
00:32:27.340And Father Ruttler says, it's a wicked generation that seeks a sign and wonder, and it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
00:32:34.140He says, I was saved by God for a purpose, to make America great again.
00:32:39.520He wasn't saved by God just so that he can go play more golf, I don't think.
00:33:05.640And in this speech, he says off the top, he says, hey, all right, I want to talk about a few things.
00:33:10.500When I wrote my speech for up there, I had a great speech.
00:33:13.960And Melania and JD told me that I couldn't give this speech.
00:33:17.020She said, they said, it's such a great speech, but you got all this mean stuff in there, and you're settling scores, and you're going after people, and you're being, and, you know, listen, Don, just come on.
00:39:38.060You don't have to take my word for it.
00:39:41.180CNN spelled it out on inauguration day.
00:39:44.260The final hours of his presidency were spent, reportedly, in a dark mood.
00:39:49.060All of our reporting, talking to sources in recent days and weeks really suggests that the president is in a bit of a dark space when it comes to just his headspace in these very final days.
00:40:01.840We are told that he never really stopped feeling angry about the fact that he believes he was forced out this pressure campaign to drop out of the 2024 race.
00:40:13.480And then, especially since election day, when his vice president, Kamala Harris, was defeated by Donald Trump, he has grown increasingly embittered, we are told by sources, at the blame that he has gotten for Donald Trump's eventual return to the White House.
00:40:30.880And one thing, importantly, that President Biden has been absolutely consistent about is this belief that he believes that had he stayed in the race, he would have defeated Donald Trump again.
00:40:42.520Now, all of this adds up to, I would say, a mood of sadness and sort of this sense of tragedy here at the White House, those around him believing and actually hoping that when history judges President Biden years from now, that it will be a little bit more forgiving than how the president is being widely judged, at least today.
00:41:03.220History will not be more forgiving to Biden.
00:41:06.980I'm willing to go with Biden a little bit here and say, at the very least, I think he would have done better than Kamala, even after the disastrous first debate.
00:41:16.540Because he might have done better in the second debate.
00:41:18.780They might have shot him up with more adrenaline.
00:41:21.440Presidents have won elections after bad debates, even though the Biden debate was particularly bad because he could barely speak.
00:41:28.380But I think he would have done better than Kamala.
00:42:51.900Not only does he leave the White House and leave his entire political career without any notable accomplishment whatsoever over half a century in politics, but he leaves looking corrupt.
00:43:09.220He leaves looking petty and out for personal gain.
00:43:13.820Joe Biden is a relatively wealthy guy.
00:43:16.340He's a wealthy guy for having been a government employee his whole life.
00:43:19.620And we have some speculation as to how he got that rich, because we know that his kid was peddling influence all around the world.
00:43:29.500We know that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden's business.
00:43:32.920We know he was on a lot of phone calls with Hunter Biden's business pals who were shaking down foreign countries, peddling Joe's influence, getting money.
00:43:40.860And we know from the Hunter Biden laptop that Hunter Biden at least said that he was kicking up 10% or even half of it to the big guy, Joe Biden.
00:43:49.000So Biden is leaving not merely as a nothing.
00:43:52.940He's leaving as looking like a dirty, sleazy politician.
00:43:56.380I think that's why he's in a dark mood.
00:43:58.740I think he's in a dark mood, not because of the 2024 election and how he really thought he could win.
00:44:08.140And he said publicly that he had a sense that maybe he couldn't totally finish out a second term.
00:44:42.300We know that Joe Biden gave Hunter a 10-year pardon, blanket pardon for any crimes that he did or might have committed.
00:44:51.940Any crimes of which he was accused and crimes that he wasn't even yet accused of.
00:44:55.920And he just did the same thing for his brother, James, for his sister-in-law, Sarah Jones Biden, for his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, for his brother-in-law, John T. Owens, and for his younger brother, Francis.
00:45:09.140Pardons to cover any nonviolent offense from, and this is where it looks so dirty, from January 1st, 2014, until the day before Trump's inauguration.
00:47:34.700And it feels like we're moving into some new self-conception of America.
00:47:38.360And maybe, if Trump is right, that's going to be a golden age.
00:47:42.640It was such a good day for Trump yesterday.
00:47:44.560I haven't even gotten into how he became a crypto billionaire and how now something like 85% of his net worth, 89% of his net worth, sorry, is in crypto.
00:47:52.540I guess I'm going to have to get to that tomorrow.
00:47:55.400There's no member block today because I'm in D.C. and I have to come home.